The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
the tree-tops that loveliest bird of the North-American forest, the
great crested woodpecker. Here and there, to introduce a human element,
came cleared spaces by the river's brink, where pointed wands stood
impaling flakes of red salmon-flesh,--the open-air curing-house and
out-door store-room of the Pitt-River Indians. Once in the course of the
day we lighted on a picturesque ragged hut, where the purveyors of this
meat were soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight,--where little
savages of every degree of gauntness in their limbs, ochriness on their
cheeks, shockiness in their heads, and protuberance in their
abdomens, were gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral
_embonpoint_,--where white men, lower than the lowest Diggers they
herded with, had forgotten the little they ever knew of civilization,
and stood glaring at us like half-sated Satyrs as we passed. Other bits
of _genre_ hourly came into the picture with pappoose-carrying squaws
who hunted yew-berries along the road-side fringe of woods, youngsters
wearing no attire but a party-colored acorn-basket of deft finger-work,
which they carried loaded on their shoulders, or listlessly trailed
empty at their sides. Dr. Prichard has some hideous pictures of Papuans
and Australians; but if Ethnology were a match-game, we could give him
those two points, and beat him easily by playing a few of the Digger
women whom we saw that day. They reached the ugliness of aboriginal
specimens which we had encountered on the west verge of the Goshoot
country; and if any earthly pilgrimage, short of the mountains of
Nightmare, can reveal _their_ rivals, I should like to get into a prime
state of health and be allowed a peep at them through a spy-glass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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